Over on the Whisper Collective Podcast, I’ve just released a series of audio recordings from the new book, Writing Well and Being Well for your PhD and Beyond.
In this fourth practice, I walk you through the first of three breathing practices. This one is best if you need to feel calmer. It’s hard to read and count and breathe, but it’s easy to breathe if someone else keeps count for you, so let me help you out.
Breathing is amazing. Your brain checks in on your breathing to find out how things are going in the body, including to work out if it should help out by pumping out stress or calm reactions. So choosing your breath can help you influence your emotions.
If you sit down to write and feel your ‘flight’ or ‘freeze’ stress reaction activate because you want to run away from the scary writing, then that will get in the way of the thing you want to do, which is stick at the desk and write some words. Here is a calming breath practice for when writing stresses you out in a bad way.
Take a deep breath, find some calm before you start writing in this 2-minute breathing practice.
Listen here, with links to all your favourite listening platforms:
This practice comes from Chapter 5, ‘Editing’ in Writing Well and Being Well for your PhD and Beyond.
Photo by Tim Foster on Unsplash
